Two comments on this:
1) You [CollabNet] are effectively the owner of the Copyright on Subversion.
If you're comfortable with referential license, then we can definitely do
it that way.
2) Personally, I feel it is more than sufficient to use that approach:
a) The file asserts a Copyright. By virtue of Copyright law, a person
cannot make any copies at all. The license is what gives them those
rights, so a strict reading of the file itself (without reference to
the LICENSE file) will give them NO rights.
b) A reference in the file to the LICENSE is what provides the ability to
make copies.
However, Roy has a point here about "what happens when the file is
outside of the package with the LICENSE file?" Even worse, what
happens if somebody repackages with a LICENSE that states something
funny?
Answer: don't refer to a *file*. Refer to a URL that contains the
license. As the sole owner/admin of that URL space, you can make sure
that the URL always contains the proper license.
I would also recommend versioning the license URL. I do this with mod_dav,
referring people to http://www.webdav.org/mod_dav/license-1.html. Should I
desire to change the license in the future, I can change it to
license-2.html and release the software with the new reference. Anybody with
the old software still refers to license-1.html and can work with it under
that license.
Note: I started on the license updating below because I found some files in
subversion/client/ that had the *wrong* license. Not just typos or tweaks,
but flat out wrong. I wrote a script to find all the problematic files and
have been tweaking those; just not at the client files yet.
In any case, I'll continue with the tweaking of the licenses until I hear
that you would prefer a reference-style of license (which I believe is a
Good Thing and would recommend).
Cheers,
-g
On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 03:55:44PM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>
> Thanks tons, Greg.
>
> I'd certainly be fine with putting the license in a single file and
> referring to that at the top of each source file, instead of duplicated
> elsewhere; Roy Fielding argued against this with Apache code because it'd
> make it easier for someone to accidentally not follow the license, he
> claimed (imagine someone getting a .c file but not a copy of
> LICENSE). Thoughts?
>
> Brian
>
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Greg Stein wrote:
> > Look for more license fixups in a while. Stepping out for some errands now.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > -g
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 11:00:53PM -0000, gstein@tigris.org wrote:
> > > User: gstein
> > > Date: 00/11/16 15:00:53
> > >
> > > Modified: subversion/tests-common svn_test_editor.c
> > > subversion/libsvn_ra_dav commit.c fetch.c ra_session.h
> > > session.c
> > > subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/tests ra-dav-test.c
> > > subversion/libsvn_client add.c apply_edits.c checkout.c
> > > client.h commit.c delete.c status.c update.c
> > > Log:
> > > fix URL in license. should be: http://www.Collab.Net/
> >
> >
>
> --
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> CollabNet | open source | do what's right | now hiring
>
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:15 2006